The Front National Appeals to French Left Intellectuals.

At the end of September the Front National launched an appeal to “left-wing intellectuals” meeting at the Mutualité (home of large public meetings, roughly a version as the Friends Meeting House in London) held by the weekly, Marianne. Around the philosopher Michel Onfray, Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Jean-François Kahn Jean-Pierre Chevènement are to speak.

Your meeting of 20 October 2015 could be more than an amiable and friendly get together. It could become one of those crucial dates in the history of France. It could be the prelude to the union of the people of France. It is up to you to decide to open an inclusive discussion between all patriots, all Republicans, all sovereignists. Of course, the self-righteous will deliver anathemas and excommunications. It will be for us to despise the prohibitions laid down by the media-political caste.

The basis of this appeal is on “sovereignty” – that is the defence of the French nation’s power, through its own political institutions to make ‘its’ own decisions.

On this ground there should be, the FN asserts, some degree of common thinking.

You will denounce the treason of the parties who still claim to be on the left. They have chosen ultra-liberal globalisation in the name of Europe. They have confused internationalism with the massive migrations which weigh on the wage earners and which erode social legislation. They forget the origin of the insult “jaune” (yellow) which trade unions used to throw at strike breakers.

I am at a loss here.

One theory is that Jaune comes from a strike of 1899 at Montceau-les-Mines (Saône-et-Loire) used against a small group of miners, who refused to join in. The strikers smashed the windows of their meeting place, le Café de la mairie. The windows were replaced with yellow paper. Another theory is that comes from the dye colour (sulfur) of strike breakers at another disputes in 1970.

I would however bet, with the degree of possibility bordering on certainty, that the Front National meant……Chinese…..

There has been a great deal of debate about this appeal.

Those addressed have rejected the idea that they should engage actively with the FN.

Nevertheless it’s not hard to see that Régis Debray’s essay Éloge des frontières (2011), to cite one example (his writings on the Nation go back to the 1980s), indicates at least some meeting points on nationalism and the fear of cosmopolitanism and not only globalisation. Alain Finkielkraut signed the petition this yearTouche pas à mon église – a protest against turning churches into Mosques, in actual fact a phenomenon confined to a handful of buildings – with strong echoes of Maurice Barrès’s defence of “la terre et les morts.” Chevènement has developed a patriotism and a paranoia about the Euro. He has come a long away (as has Debray) from his left-wing days in the 1970s. Jean-François Kahn who founded Marianne has preferred to accuse the liberal supporters of globalisation ignoring the social issues that have given rise to the FN, and distance himself from any complicity with either the FN (Qui fait le jeu du Front national ?) In short, Kahn would say that excluding the far-right from the national debate is not the way to deal with Marine Le Pen……

Michel Onfray – a home-spun philosopher, known in the anglophone world as an atheist, a hedonist (in the classical sense) but also a libertarian leftist, if not anarchist – has given a greater variety of contradictory responses than Bernard Henri-Lévy on a bad day.

(Hat-tip: Fabienne)

Having read Onfray’s Traité d’Athéologie (2005), which offers a clear attack on the use of religion in politics, from Catholicism to Islamism, I can only contrast it with the utter confusion of his more recent tomes assembled under the name of La contre histoire de la philosophie (2006 onwards), which barely bear skimming.

It is important to underline that it is this issue of the ‘Nation’ as the ground of the Republic which acts as a meeting point between ‘left’ and far-Right. That is not ‘migration’ as such, not race, and certainly not Laïcité.

On the racial issue a more traditional alignment between Right and Extreme-Right has taken place in the last week when one of Sarkozy’s politicians, Nadine Morano, was removed from a regional election for asserting that France is a country of the “white race”.

Perhaps most significant is the way the Front National has entered the intellectual arena.

This was confirmed a couple days in way that drew the attention of the Financial Times.

France’s National Front (FN), long a pariah on leading university campuses, has secured the right to create a political group at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), underlining the resurgent far-right party’s willingness to enter the circles of the French elite.

The newly formed group quickly obtained the 120 votes required to gain validation from the prestigious institute during a four-day “recognition” process of all student associations.

It will co-exist with other political groups, including the Socialist party, the centre-right Republicans party and the far-left Front de Gauche.

“The National Front has made a deafening entry at Sciences Po,” tweeted Marine Le Pen, the party’s leader.

The creation of an FN-linked organisation at Sciences Po, a school whose students traditionally lean to the left and whose alumni include the last five French presidents, reflects Ms Le Pen’s desire to become more mainstream. By doing so, she is breaking from her father and FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who positioned the party as an outsider on the fringes of French politics.

9 Responses

“The first yellow union in France, the Fédération nationale des Jaunes de France (“National Federation of the Yellows of France”) was created by Pierre Biétry in 1902. The yellow color was deliberately chosen in opposition to the red color associated with socialism. Yellow unions, in opposition to red unions such as the Confédération Générale du Travail, rejected class struggle and favored the collaboration of capital and labor, and were opposed to strikes. According to Zeev Sternhell, the yellow union of Biétry had a membership of about a third of that of the Confédération Générale du Travail, and was funded by corporate interests. Moreover, also according to Sternell, there were close relationships between Pierre Biétry and Maurice Barrès and the Action Française.”

Maybe one can speak of “yellow intellectuals”, although I don’t know how many were “red” in the first place (or indeed what is their intellectual capabalities).

I agree that Sternhall has a tendency to exxagerate the inluence of part of the revolutionary left on the origins of fascism. The note from him I qouted has nothing to do with the left, but with the connection between the Yellow Union in France and “Action Française”, the monarchist proto- fascist predecessor of the Front Nationale. It helps to show how empty the FN’s “social” (in truth, corporatist) demagogy is, and honestly I think that any leftist stupid enough to believe it, does not deserve to be called an intellectual.

Action Française still exists and is not linked to the Front National. Concerning the social part of FN ideology, you should probably have a look at people like Charles Péguy, Emmanuel Mounier or Abbé Pierre and wonder which party they would vote for today. Catholicism is the root ideology of the FN (and of France) and it has many things in common with Socialism (equality of souls, care of the poor, opposition to the free-market, etc…). That people switch from one to another in a period of economical, political and intellectual troubles is not that surprising.

Jaurès was a pacifist traitor and Péguy was right to denounce him. In addition, according to Péguy, Jaurès ans the socialists of his time (1910s) betrayed the French people because they were focused on economical demand and forgot spiritual needs. Isn’t it a very personnalist attitude ?

That some jews use the Shoah to mute the objections against their lobby’s policy is a fact, not crime nore a call to racial hatred… And shall I remind you that Abbé Pierre was an active resistant who saved many jews during german occupation ?

The common ground (between these three men, not between you and me) is they knew human beings have spiritual needs that materialists (either communist or liberal) denies and they concluded that capitalism needs rules to be moralised.